Something strange with #LinkedIn – Zakład optyczny and other fake companies

So I was recently playing around with LinkedIn’s country filter (mainly to help our Boolean friend simultaneously search within multiple EU countries) when I noticed something quite bizarre…

I wanted to see which company had the most LinkedIn members in Poland (Hungary or Czech) so I used these location filters and went to ‘All companies’.

In Poland, it is a company called ‘Zakład optyczny’ with more than 12K employees and that – as I do not speak Polish – sounded like such a nice, large and decent local firm.

The first strange finding, however, was seeing one of my colleagues’ profile listed under this firm… Marta surely works for Randstad so I checked this company in Google and realized these words were not referring to any company but simply to the word ‘optician’. Certainly, Marta is not an optician and it is even more certain that there are no 12K Polish optician users on LinkedIn today. What is going on??

If you go to Marta’s profile you see that she added a comma after Randstad so that LinkedIn was not able to properly recognize the company. If you check the profile of this company you see that it indicates a size of 201-500 employees and actually, the profile is a quite nicely completed one.

If you check, however, the links added to the company profile it immediately gives you the impression that something smells pretty bad. This company profile is fake, the URLs are probably harmful for your PC and it is, of course, just not true that it employs 12 K people in Poland.

Go and play around with your country: you will see very similar No.1 fake company profiles!… Most of them are not existing and their URL is not leading to anywhere.

Hmmm…. WHAT IS THIS??

I can understand that as fake ‘human’ profiles exist fake company profiles can exist, too, but… why do LinkedIn seem to automatically add/link these company profiles when a user is missing to use a proper one? Is there anyone at LinkedIn who is checking or filtering these companies and removing the ones which seem to be scams?

Well, I am not much scared (hey, I am a sourcer!) and actually found a Hungarian example being extremely funny but still… LinkedIn – hope you will hear me and see the potential risk in it?

Cracking Open Facebook – my show on #trulondon #sourcinglab

This is the prezi I have created to help you get my newest top sourcing materials.

I have been fortunate to discover some amazing Facebook search tricks. You will also find a new Google Custom Search Engine (CSE) which x-rays Facebook for fans and likes and comments.

Check it out and let me know your thoughts!

PS. The email piece is definitely amazing. Will it change the whole candidate communication in sourcing?? What do you think?

Cracking Open Facebook on Prezi

Another Scary Talent ID Tool – Sourcing On Facebook

Facebook has got a ‘See friendship’ function which is meant to show your mutual friends with any of your friends. You can easily find it on a friend’s timeline.

The scary thing is that this feature (its URL) can be applied for any of the Facebook users so it can be a rather powerful sourcing tool when looking for colleagues, peers and other employees of a company! Facebook, we love you!

Let’s say we are after support engineers at Microsoft in Netherlands…

As we need at least one name (candidate) for a start go for LinkedIn and do a quick search. You will get some good results by using a basic search string but say, it is not enough for now. You want to find more of these guys or even more: you want to find all of the support engineers at Microsoft Netherlands.

So once you have identified a good profile go and check him on Facebook. If you have some luck you will find his friends being visible for a non-friend visitor, too. As you have to have two users for using the ‘See friendship’ function you either search for another Microsoft employee through other channels or easily check who else is among this candidate’s friends working for Microsoft.

By choosing the ‘Search by workplace’ option you can add the company name. Please note, this will bring not only current employees but everyone else, too who has ever added Microsoft as their workplace.

Go for the ‘See friendship’ link and replace your and your friend’s ID with your candidates’ IDs. The Facebook ID is in the URL like this:

And here we go! After replacing the IDs you will see who these users know in common. Certainly, it can happen that not all of the results are (current) Microsoft employees.

The trick is based on the assumption that the mutual friends of two current employees should be colleagues (or former colleagues) from the same company.

Finally, do not miss to check the ‘Browse Friendships’ feature on the right hand side as it can enormously build your Talent Pool.

It is quite powerful, isn’t it!

This tool can be helpful for any talent mapping project. Also, it can bring those profiles, too, whose, for instance, LinkedIn profile is poor in data.

I believe this is a basically new methodology of Talent Sourcing that I would call: network-based sourcing. Here we are not applying Boolean or any keyword-based searches but tapping into a network to find candidates based on friendship, interest and a ‘common story’.

Good hunting, folks!

A Few Of My Favourite Facebook Strings

The only thing that makes a sourcer optimistic is the belief that people make mistakes.

I have been trying to source from Facebook for quite a long time and it has always seemed to be a mission impossible for me. However, the hope that one day we will be able to identify candidates from that 800m+ Talent Pool made me simply too hungry and desperate to not give it up.

Here I share a few new tricks – which I believe have not yet been discovered before – how to retrieve the publicly available data on Facebook.

(While it is nice to imagine we are dealing with secret intelligence here it would be way too ambitious to say we are doing any hacking on Facebook.)

1. X-Raying Facebook Fans

If you log out from Facebook and check a public profile you will see that users often forget to make their fan pages hidden they have given a like before. Although, beside the person’s name and this information nothing else seems to be publicly shared, this is still very good for us for a start.

People like pages based on their interest and thanks to the aggressive page generation activity on Facebook people like more and more pages and tend to like anything which is related to them in any way. Oh, Vanitatum Vanitas!

So for instance, if we are sourcing for MBA professionals from INSEAD it is now an easy way to see who has liked any of the INSEAD MBA fan pages.

We can use this string and it will bring a very good amount of professionals who have got an interaction with this Uni.

Please note…

1. You may add “others named” to your string to narrow the search results only to user profiles.
2. It brings only those fans who let their fan pages be visible on the web.
3. This string is built upon the assumption that one likes a page because they have got a story (or history) with that. It can be though only their interest.
4. You can more narrow your results by adding new keywords. For example, this can be a string for INSEAD MBA guys from France.

2. Searching For People Based On Their Interest

The same logic is applied here as above but we are now x-raying a combination of fan pages a person has liked.

The assumption is that if I am local to Stockholm (Sweden) and an SAP professional I may look for and like pages from both of these areas of my life – correct?

By adding these keywords to a string I can get profiles who most seem to match my requirements.

Please note…

1. People often like sport clubs, restaurants, movies and so which title may contain the given keywords (e.g. Stockholm FC) – certainly it can bring you fake results as well.

3. Being Hidden Is Relative…

You can choose to make your very own Facebook profile become fully invisible on the web – but you cannot hide your likes or comments made on a Facebook fan page. These pages – guess, mainly for marketing reasons – are NOT hidden so please be aware: your content is very well searchable.

You can use this string to see what your candidate liked and/or commented.

It can help you

1. Better identify your candidates before you connect with them
2. Do a more engaging conversation with your candidates knowing a lot about their interest and language.

Please note... that you can always use the cached content which will highlight your candidate’s name on a page.

Sourcers cannot be grateful enough for Facebook boosting the Fan Page activity. I am sure we will see soon loads of new tricks and ways how to retrieve even more human capital data.

Should you have anything to share with the world please leave a comment below. Thanks for reading it!

How To Measure Your Talent Scout? INFOGRAPHIC

What is the primarily goal of a Talent Scout?

You may say: it is certainly the hire.

But can a Talent Scout/Sourcer be fully responsible for the hire if the recruiting mix contains more channels than only the traditional direct (‘passive candidate’) sourcing? Certainly not!

If it is not necessary the hire that makes a Sourcer successful (recognized?) what is the measurement of their success? And vica versa: if a Sourcer seems to be not efficient enough what is the measurement that will tell you why your Sourcer has got stuck?

With my ever first INFOGRAPHIC I present some new measurements that you can apply. I have been working with them for a while and if you are comfortable with this data-driven approach it can be a rather helpful tool to quickly understand where your colleagues are.

Go for it! …and let me know your thoughts.

X-ray Your #in Connections’ Connections

It is not a game changer trick but a rather helpful one if you directly want to search within your #in connections’ connections.

Why do I think it is worth for sharing?

1. Often, #in profiles remain hidden from us as they do not contain the keywords we are using in a search. With this trick our search can more rely on someone’s network (aka current and former colleagues) and bring all the profiles who we may have missed when using a string.
2. By having a basic #in account (which I do so) we usually much narrow the search to get not more than 100 profiles. With this trick we can work from a higher-quality candidate pool so that the narrowing will be easier and more precise.
3. For agency recruiters, it is a very smart way to see which other agencies an HR person has been already connected with… Ouch!
4. For corporate recruiters, it is helpful to see and search for someone’s network from the competition.

Let’s have an example, saying, we are after sourcing professionals from Poland.

Rather than going for #in Advanced Search and trying to apply a string I look for a person who is either based out of Poland or a Polish recruiting LION or having a large global/regional recruiting/sourcing network.

I use this link. It brings the network of that one person only and I can now better use the #in filtering options.

(The link above shows you my network, the pics below show the sample.)

I remove all mutual (1st level) connections assuming I already know and have re-connected with them.

Now I go for the location or add any new keywords or filter a company to narrow the results. Here we go!

I can now search everyone who I may have missed before!

Final comments

1. At the end of this link replace the id with your connection’s id (pic below)!
2. Note that you cannot x-ray a network if someone has hidden their #in connections from you.